Neither of those episodes is that bad. Yeah, they're pretty bad, but not nearly on the painful level of Let he Who is Without Sin... or the A-plots of Meridian and the Muse. They even have some quite funny scenes. Unfortunately, the real worst episode of DS9; The Emperor's New Cloak, is still coming...

Well, then to cheer you up: there's not a single awful episode coming up this season again; and only one bad one and one meh one (and both are near the end, still far away). The rest is all good or great. (at least in my eyes...)

I've eased myself off the alcohol by going back on the meth. Does that count as sober?

Things Past (***½)

Garak, bored of hemming trousers in his prison cell, decides to take a day off to attend a conference and Sisko, Dax, and Odo decide to go with him because, hey, who doesn't want to spend time with Garak? On the way back, from the conference, the crew meet the ghost of Christmas past and it decides to send them on a mind-bending trip into the guilt-centre of Odo's brain.

Here's the thing, the writers wanted to do a story about Odo's dark past, but didn't want to do a flashback episode because they're clichéd, and they didn't want to do a time-travel episode because they're also clichéd, so they came up with some complicated magic in order to do the episode the way they wanted to do it. This both hurts and helps the episode, it hurts it because the set-up is so crazy that it's hard to buy into, and the early parts of the episode, which should have been full of mystery and intrigue, are undercut by the fact that all of this is explained by Dr Bashir. We also get the added added complication that injuries sustained by the characters in Odo's brain are replicated by their bodies in the real world due to the awesome power of imagination, which leaves us with the cliché that they. Might. Die! (But almost certainly wont.) The episode didn't need that, it's just a cheap way of adding tension to the crazy situation.

But the craziness does help the episode later as events get more surreal, and we get some weird twists and unusual imagery. Overall, the story isn't bad, perhaps a bit slow to start but it picks up later, and the revelation that Odo isn't as perfect as he wants everyone to think he is an interesting extra layer to his character. It ends with a callback to Necessary Evil, which just served to remind me of how that was a better episode, in part because the set-up wasn't as convoluted.

Everyone complains about Worf being a jerk in Let He Without Sin... but really so was Dax. The whole episode she was acting very selfish the entire episode too. First she should probably know taking Worf, the Klingon glacier to a pleasure planet is a bad idea. She forced her idea down Worf's throat, then complained non-stop the whole episode when surprise... Worf didn't like it. To escelate the situation she's acting in a way she has to know would deliberately annoy Worf. I'm not excusing Worf's behavior by any means, but really what did you expect from him?

The Fundamentalists... would have been so much more interesting if they weren't like those enviromental nutcases sabotaging SUV's to protest car pollution. Any point they might have had to make gets lost in their idiocy of their methods.

Really the most amusing part of the episode is Quark acting completely in character. Which naturally(and thankfully) once she goes off with the girls, that's the last we see of him for awhile. I like Quark but I don't need to see him in the middle of an orgy.

Things Past... yeah Garak got out of prison awfully quick didn't he? But the Federation penal system is so generous maybe they just let him out on good behavior. "Now be good and don't try and genocide any planets again and start an interstellar war."

I applaud DS9 for avoiding the flashback and overly Trek cliche of time travel. The execution here was awkard to say the least and you just have to smile and nod at it. It's nice to see Odo isn't the saint of justice like the show so often makes him out to be, but a character with a darker element. Honestly if I was giving him a D&D alignment, I'd make him Lawful Neutral. He pretty much just wants order no matter who's running the show. I think he was remorseful of his actions just as much because he knew it would upset Kira not to mention stain his perfect record as to the morality of it.

Really I don't see why Kira has the right to be upset at the end given how Necessary Evil ended and she had her darker elements.

I liked Things Past a lot... But one odd thing is Garak being quite ungarakky. He doesn't do much in the episode, pickpocketing one guard and hacking into the computer for relatively useless information, that's all, and he gets off only one or two memorable lines. He's a lot less useful and less snarky than he usually is, which leads me to wonder if the part was originally written for Chief O'Brien or Dax (presumably with Kira in place of where Dax was in the eventual episode) before they figured Garak was always a good thing to have in your episode.

I've eased myself off the alcohol by going back on the meth. Does that count as sober?

Click to expand...

Having recently lurked over at the Gaming sub-forum, I discovered that Godben is also a Civilization player. It then occurred to me that these relapses are actually codes for the games he's playing at a given time. Gander:

Mass Effect 3 = Alcohol
Everything during a binge seems wonderful, emotionally gratifying, and you can't wait to do it again. Yet, at the end of it all, you're left feeling miserable and utterly depressed. And those last moments? Somehow can't remember, and you suspect it's better that way.

Civilization V = Meth
As a recovered Civ2 addict, I know what these games are like. Always jonesing for one more round, one more round, one more hit, one more hit. And this can go on for days without realizing it. Still, if Civ2 was like digital crack, Civ5 has got to be the ultra-addictive upgraded shit.

Meth is easily the way forward - glad to see you're recovering! I think the new ending for Mass Effect seemed to help the transition from one substance to another, by not being a more substantial schange that it needed to be.

Addictions for everyone!

Things Past is almost a poor man's Necessary Evil, but only almost. There's still plenty to like about it, even if the framing device is somewhat clumsy.

Hmm, I'd say that Civilization is more like heroin, you just sort of relax and enter an other-worldly state for hours on end, completely losing track of the world around you, but never really feeling in any danger.

Minecraft is the meth of gaming. It consumes your time in a similar way, but you're constantly on edge throughout the experience, you always feel like there's something behind you watching everything you do, waiting for the right moment to pounce. It also feeds the player's obsessive compulsive tendencies.

As far as Garak in this episode...I would have thought enduring the treatment the Bajorans did would've taught him a lesson--but no. I hate to say this...but I would've liked to see him suffer more. He deserved it.